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ChatGPT for Excel

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Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#21

Post by cubefox »

jannyfer wrote: post #7
TrackerFF wrote: post #6

I've experimented with ChatGPT for spreadsheets the past 6 months, and while the results look nice now it has been excruciatingly slow for even the simplest spreadsheet. I'm talking 15-20 minutes to make some pretty basic calculator with graphs. IIRC, it used a lot of time purely on the styling.

Adding a tangential anecdote. I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output. Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though). SVG looks similar t…

Gemini is very good with SVG, but I don't really see the similarity to spreadsheets.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#22

Post by brett-jackson »

jannyfer wrote: post #7
TrackerFF wrote: post #6

I've experimented with ChatGPT for spreadsheets the past 6 months, and while the results look nice now it has been excruciatingly slow for even the simplest spreadsheet. I'm talking 15-20 minutes to make some pretty basic calculator with graphs. IIRC, it used a lot of time purely on the styling.

Adding a tangential anecdote. I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output. Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though). SVG looks similar t…

I’d try asking it for a mermaid diagram. I think ChatGPT’s web interface will render them.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#23

Post by p_ing »

Microsoft has this built-in using Claude models (for M365 Copilot licensed users). I don't know why you'd use this as an M365 subscriber in an enterprise. I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving away from OAI. Even Copilot Studio agents now default to Sonnet 4.6 and not GPT 5.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#24

Post by z3c0 »

w2df wrote: post #16

As someone that knows a high-flying portfolio manager who works at a very well known firm that I wont name... I can confidently state these tools are DOA. Ive spoken to them at length about the nature of what these people actually do day-to-day. If you think its just about using excel then you're already way off. They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these people are doing in the job (accounting+corp…

This might be the first time I've seen a HN comment in a GPT thread that actually reflects what the average business user sees in GPT products.

They don't do the job, reliably or well. No amount of wishful thinking or extra tokens will change that.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#25

Post by Acmeon »

strongpigeon wrote: post #13

Oh wow, I used to work on Excel Add-Ins about 10 years ago. Even got a patent for it. I'd be curious to see how they implemented the calls. We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on Excel Web). I remember fighting so hard to have it be called `context.sync()` instead of…

Do you mean that you worked on the Excel Add-Ins platform in Excel (and not on a specific Add-In)?

If you were working on the platform itself, then I would be interested in hearing your more detailed thoughts on the matters you mentioned (especially since I am developing an open source Excel Add-In Webcellar (https://github.com/Acmeon/Webcellar)).

What do you mean with a "OM" call? And why are they especially costly on Excel web (currently my add-in is only developed for desktop Excel, but I might consider adding support for Excel web in the future)?

In any case, `context.sync()` is much better than `context.executeAsync()`.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#26

Post by kgeist »

HerbManic wrote: post #17

It was partially a joke but someone posted a image of Co-pilot in Excel to demonstrate the limits of these things. Three cells with three numbers (1, 2, 3) and co-pilot asked to sum these three up. Instead of answering with 6, it came up with 15. The comment was "If AI is doing this, a global financial crash is inevitable." Might not be real but it is something to keep an eye on. Hopefully, they are a bit more cautio…

I wonder why it's so bad. Do they just paste a CSV into the raw model? Because in my experience, even small local models can handle it reasonably well if the harness forces them to write & run a Python script that parses the table and performs the calculations, instead of relying solely on next-token prediction.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#27

Post by strongpigeon »

p_ing wrote: post #23

Microsoft has this built-in using Claude models (for M365 Copilot licensed users). I don't know why you'd use this as an M365 subscriber in an enterprise. I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving away from OAI. Even Copilot Studio agents now default to Sonnet 4.6 and not GPT 5.

> I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving away from OAI.

You're not wrong, but you'd think that given their 27% stake in OpenAI they'd put more weight behind ChatGPT integration.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#28

Post by p_ing »

strongpigeon wrote: post #27
p_ing wrote: post #23

Microsoft has this built-in using Claude models (for M365 Copilot licensed users). I don't know why you'd use this as an M365 subscriber in an enterprise. I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving away from OAI. Even Copilot Studio agents now default to Sonnet 4.6 and not GPT 5.

> I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving away from OAI. You're not wrong, but you'd think that given their 27% stake in OpenAI they'd put more weight behind ChatGPT integration.

Based on my discussion with DSEs, enterprises have not been impressed in the results of "Copilot", i.e. OAI models. MSFT has been replacing (or changing the default) to Claude across a variety of Copilot endpoints.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#29

Post by brcmthrowaway »

w2df wrote: post #16

As someone that knows a high-flying portfolio manager who works at a very well known firm that I wont name... I can confidently state these tools are DOA. Ive spoken to them at length about the nature of what these people actually do day-to-day. If you think its just about using excel then you're already way off. They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these people are doing in the job (accounting+corp…

I know the firm - it's RenTech.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#30

Post by strongpigeon »

Acmeon wrote: post #25
strongpigeon wrote: post #13

Oh wow, I used to work on Excel Add-Ins about 10 years ago. Even got a patent for it. I'd be curious to see how they implemented the calls. We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on Excel Web). I remember fighting so hard to have it be called `context.sync()` instead of…

Do you mean that you worked on the Excel Add-Ins platform in Excel (and not on a specific Add-In)? If you were working on the platform itself, then I would be interested in hearing your more detailed thoughts on the matters you mentioned (especially since I am developing an open source Excel Add-In Webcellar ( https://github.com/Acmeon/Webcellar )). What do you mean with a "OM" call? And why are they especially costl…

I worked on the Excel Add-Ins platform at Microsoft, yes. By OM call I mean "Object Model" call, basically interacting with the Excel document.

The reason those calls are expensive on Excel Web is that you're running your add-in in the browser, so every `.sync()` call has to go all the way to the server and back in order to see any changes. If you're doing those calls in a loop, you're looking at 500ms to 2-3s latency for every call (that was back then, it might be better now). On the desktop app it's not as bad since the add-in and the Excel process are on the same machine so what you're paying is mostly serialization costs.

Happy to answer more questions, though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have changed since.

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